Amyloo: Monday, November 20, 2006

I tell ya. Writing a novel for 10 bucks a day is tough work. Even if it's a tossed-off thing like I'm doing. I'm having fun though, and the idea that I am getting paid something (hopefully) from PayPerPost is a motivator for me. Here's hoping they'll continue to be such good sports about my unorthodox use of their service.

I'll be introducing other real people -- living and dead -- and fictional characters into the story. If you have any requests, let me know in the chat box. Won't promise to weave them in, but I'll try to.

I'll be archiving the story, probably once a week, in case you want to catch up and have all the chapters in one tidy spot. I think I'll plop it into the book module on my Drupal blog. I understand that dotReader, the first commercial implementation of the Open Reader format, is going to accept conversions from Drupal books.

Meg, remember we used to say we were twins because our houses had the same floor plan, only mirrored? And you tried to get your mom and dad to give you the corner bedroom so it would be just like mine? Sometimes I wonder...

"Paula?" Meg asked out loud. She had not heard from her childhood neighbor since Paula moved to Saginaw when they were eight. There was more to the missive, but Meg had to check out the final search result before trying the link.

Half afraid, but madly curious, she dropped her gaze to the last entry on the screen:

I'll tell you what to do. Save the HTML source of the search results right now. Make a blog post about all this alternate universe nonsense, and e-mail a short note with a link to the post to all the habitual players on TechMeme. You get yourself a little exposure that way, and then you run with it.

best j

Oh, that's probably a good idea. To save the source, Meg agreed. But who is "J?"

Meg's chin was trembling, in rhythm with her hands, which she snapped away from the keyboard and into her lap, afraid to touch anything for fear it would vanish.

Maybe I'll take a screen capture first, she thought, and also copy the URL. Just in case. But I want to know who wrote that.

She allowed herself to remain frozen for a full two minutes, then copied the long address, pasted it into a Notepad doc and saved it to her desktop and to her My Documents folder.

She pointed her mouse at the link in the last search result, meaning to right-click and open it in another Firefox tab to be safe, but she was so shaky that the link opened in the same window.

An XML file? What is it - a feed? she wondered. Scanning the file, filtering out the tags with her brain, she looked for a name. There it was:

Huh! Funny he'd bother with this five days after he announced he's leaving AOL.

What the heck is going on here, Meg wondered for the hundredth time in the last 10 minutes.

She clicked on the browser's back button expecting to see the search results page again, but:

"No..." Meg groaned. God, I'm such an idiot. I'm a reckless impatient four-year-old.

She buried her face in her hands, shook her head, stood, and walked away from the computer.

Meg should have captured the screen and saved the source. If she'd had her wits about her even a little, she might even have taken a picture of the monitor. Nice if an HP camera would have been sitting right on her desk, like that lucky PayPerPost staffer, Tamale. Tamale? Here's the payperpost blog item about it for you; and hopefully here's $7.50 for Meg and me. But that's only 67 words, and it needs to be 100. How far do I want to try to push my luck with this experiment? Ninety-two. Do hyphenated words count as one or two?

The Google start page loaded at a crawl. It was personalized with too many junky, slow-loading widgets. She'd have to take the time one of these days to get rid of some of them. Maybe replace them with a to-do list widget! Right now, she wanted to search for a Blake quotation she'd run across.

If it turned out the quote was Blake (Meg plotted, slyly slipping in a product placement), maybe she would see if the book was available at Alibris. Something with nice reproductions of his engravings. And she could use the Alibris online coupons. She really needed to remember to check for other coupon codes when she bought things online.

Without thinking, instead of typing in the gist of the quote, she pasted the contents of the clipboard into the search box, and hit enter.

Shoot. She realized what she had done the instant she hit the button, but decided to wait for the results instead of cancelling the search. How would that huge block of text about the Other Building behave as a search query?

Taking on awful long time, Meg thought, nearly ready to stop the churning. Then the search results began to appear on the screen. Only three results -- why did that take so long?

The results display looked slightly odd to Meg's eye; the font size seemed bigger than usual, and a decorative border framed each entry. It was the sort of singled-out treatment you would see for a sponsored link, but it was not a callout style the practiced searcher ever remembered seeing.

In a cursory skim, Meg could see that each of the three page excerpts dealt with social or philosophical commentary on identification with community or notions of "us versus them." Pretty smart search, Meg silently complimented.

Then, on closer study, she realized that the first result quote William Blake, and she had only thought about performing a search about his words.

Meg's heart wanted to pound right out of her chest when she read further and realized Blake was answering her question directly, and personally:

My Dear Miss Meg Harkin,
Our place is where our fellows dwell, and the degree of our acquaintance matters little.